It's a love/hate relationship with Jack Kilby. Mainly because I'm able to use this computer while listening to my portable CD player at the moment, TVs, stereos, etc... but I have a great love for tube amplifiers and radios and the digital age can piss me off sometimes. Damn those cell phones.
Another tube freak here. Unfortunately, cranking up my homebrew tube amps at the same time as the A/C is running would kind of defeat the purpose. Thanks to Kilby, IC op-amps, comparators, and the like make GREAT bias monitors and protective devices in vacuum tube circuitry.
why the hell arent we told about these great men? everyone in our society uses directly or indirectly something which has been made possible thanks to this guy. and many others
I knew of him, I didn't care, do you know who is responsible for the vacuum tube? even if you did would you care? Their name has no impact on your life.....
Discovering the fundamental principle behind it?--Thomas Edison, 1883 Taking that principle and applying it to radio?--John Ambrose Fleming, 1905 Adding a control grid to create an amplifier?--Lee DeForest, 1907 Pretty sad to see a self-professed "techie" with so little interest in (or respect for) the history of technology, and the people who got us where we are today...
I have an interest, it's just they did their job, their work, now we use it, take it further, I rather not at this moment know the names of the giants whose shoulders I stand on.
Have you seen the cutting edge of MODERN analog synth equipment? It even uses vacuum tubes! http://www.metasonix.com
I have to say i'm very fond of the digital domain. It's just such a blessing being able to transfer things around as much as you like and not lose anything. If you're working in analogue there's only so much you can do before your signal to noise ratio becomes unacceptable. Digital isn't better than analogue in principle by any means, but it does open a lot of doors for you to do more. Once you're dealing with a load of numbers everything's very safe and secure. A wave form can be great to start with but you daren't touch it too much, and you certainly dont' want to be sending it through too many electronic devices.
Kilby gave a final interview a couple weeks before he died. Available online at: http://www.reed-electronics.com/electronicnews/article/CA610495
its a good thing we do, because people are vain and if we didnt thered be less people trying to make history i read kirbys work, i find it as suspicious as the resulting contracts , like maybe he had more help than he let on,, i wonder if, could be , maybe, some reverse engineering going on here?
